"For competent leadership in a diverse, changing world."

Holy Currencies

Holy Currencies is a holistic model for stewardship and congregational vitality, moving beyond “time, talent, and treasure” to create missional and sustainable ministries. This model with its processes, enables church leaders to understand, develop, and utilize five other kinds of currencies besides money that are essential for creating sustainable and missional ministries. These currencies are: Time & Place, Gracious Leadership, Relationship, Truth, and Wellness. These currencies flow and recirculate to form a Cycle of Blessings which empower congregations to strengthen their internal relationships as well as reach out and connect with the diverse populations in their neighborhoods.

The Book

Holy Currencies: Six Blessings for Sustainable Missional Ministries by Eric H. F. Law gives a overview of the Holy Currencies/Cycle of Blessings model. It fully describes all six currencies including: what they are, how to develop them, the exchanges of blessings impact, and how to assist congregation members to value them. Also, this book showcases five missional and sustainable ministries which exemplify the Cycle of Blessings.

See what people are saying about the Holy Currencies book at the bottom of this page.

The new book, coming soon!

The Curriculum

The Kaleidoscope Institute has a network of Catalysts (facilitators) and Associates who can provide Holy Currencies Training for leaders of your church and ministries. There are three ways to access this training:

Covenant with KI and be partners in community transformation. A KI Associate will design a consultation process for your church engaging church leaders and members, and the neighborhood community to work through the Holy Currencies curriculum. The result is the creation and launching of new missional and sustainable ministries.

Goals:

To transform the way community and church leaders think about church from a static, linear and maintenance-type mode to a dynamic, circulatory, and rejuvenating vision. To be a church that interacts with the wider community by maximizing the flow of spiritual, human, and economic resources.

To empower church and community leaders with skills and knowledge to serve their communities more inclusively by facilitating and developing access to their Holy Currencies, thereby making both the churches and their related communities more sustainable.

Objectives:

Through reading, dialogue, activities and active engagement with their local congregations and communities, participants will:

be empowered to shift the way they think about ministries: from fear to grace, from grasping at power to sharing blessings, and from maintenance to missional focus;

explore in-depth, the six essential currencies for missional and sustainable ministries: Relationship, Truth, Wellness, Gracious Leadership, Money, and Time/Place, conduct an inventory of each of the currencies for their local ministry contexts, and learn how to develop these currencies;

transform some of their current ministries toward becoming more missional by consciously infusing them with the internal and external currencies of relationship, truth and wellness; and

create new missional and sustainable ministries that they will implement following the completion of the course.

Holy Currencies Orientation: (4 hours) This is an overview of Holy Currencies—a wholistic model for stewardship and congregation vitality, moving beyond “time, talent, and treasure” to create missional and sustainable ministries. Participants will experience some of the dialogue processes that will enable them to understand and utilize five other kinds of currencies besides money that are essential for creating sustainable and missional ministries—Currencies of Time/Place, Gracious Leadership, Relationship, Truth, Wellness, and Money.

Missional Ministries in the Grace Margin: (12 hours) If the congregation members have not done much reflection about what it means and how to become a missional church, this six-session dialogue program will enable church members to move toward missional thinking—from fear to grace, from holding on to power to sharing blessings, and from maintenance to finding fresh-expressions ministries to reach the unchurched. This program can be employed to prepare a congregation to engage in the full Holy Currencies curriculum.

Holy Currencies: (32 hours) This is an in-depth training using Holy Currencies—Six Blessings for Sustainable and Missional Ministries as the principle text. A team of leaders from a local church or ministry will learn to assess and develop all six currencies, moving toward creating new visions of missional and sustainable ministries. The team through this course will engage the church members and the neighborhood community to collect data, share and speak the truth, and access their wellness. The end result is an achievable, realistic and measurable action plan that the team can implement in order to launch and sustain at least one new missional ministry.

You may order copies of the ‘Holy Currencies’ book through KI

Holy Currencies is published by Chalice Press. You may order the book by going to our donation page and enter a donation between $13.99 and $20.00 per book in the General Donations item, and indicate it is for the Holy Currencies books. We prefer orders over five books to allow savings on postage. (For Canadian orders, we suggest adding $10 additional postage.) Follow the instructions to enter your name and address and payment information, and we will ship the books to you as soon as we can. If you are ordering less than five books, we suggest that you order through your local bookstore; for e-copies, go to one of the online booksellers, such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Chapters, Indigo, or Coles; or contact Chalice Press directly.

What people are saying about ‘Holy Currencies’

“Eric Law’s latest book combines profound insight into God’s economy of abundance with abundant practical advice to congregations on how to move from scarcity to gift. We all have assets—friendship, leadership authority, truthfulness, time and place, to name a few—which, if spent in mission, will yield new opportunities for sustainable ministry... A must read for Christians paralyzed in survival mode.”

— Thomas E. Breidenthal, Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio

“Holy Currencies is insightful, practical, and easy to use with any small group, and it has the potential to pay large dividends through the creation of energized and equipped leadership.”

“Holy Currencies will quickly become a key text in congregational vitality, stewardship, mission, and organizational development... At a time when many organizations and faith communities are looking at the hard questions of sustainability, Holy Currencies transforms the conversation and offers new hope.”

— Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook, Bloy House and the Claremont School of Theology

“Reverend Law has once again blessed the church by brilliantly defining and describing the ecology of sustainable missional ministry. Care for and attention to this ‘ecosystem’ will help us all engage ministry in the confidence that we already have every blessing we need to be faithful and fruitful.”

— Gregory Vaughn Palmer, Resident Bishop of Ohio West Episcopal Area, The United Methodist Church

“Eric Law has taken anxiety about declining resources and scarce money and turned it upside down and inside out. With fresh new perspectives and useful tools he opens our eyes to see currencies of abundance.”

Forming learning communities through a network of Catalysts and Mentors.

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GracEconomics: A gift-based system of holy currency exchanges, that insures the ongoing circulation of currencies to cultivate a sustainable ministry. When applying GracEconomics to the flow of money in an entrepreneurial ministry, it usually means providing a range in which a client or guest can contribute. If the client or guest does not have money, he or she can pay with other kinds of currencies such as time, relationship, talent, truth, leadership, etc.